Manaslu Himal is the mountain range we have just spent 18 days walking around. The highest peak is Manaslu at 8163m. You have to have a permit to go there, although its not an expensive one. In fact you need 3 permits one for MCAP Manaslu Conservation Area Project, a “special permit” – part of this trek goes through a so called restricted area, and ACAP permit which is because the trek finishes in the Annapurna CAP. There’s loads of beaurocracy in Nepal regarding visiting different districts, to keep them well managed, reduce the flow of visitors and generate some money. It can get ridiculous though and to climb a peak will cost 1000 dollars by the time you have paid for guides, permits and camping arrangements. Its 70000 dollars to climb Everest so next time then! Trekking in Nepal is not really dirt cheap any more. If you are going to Everest or Annapurna you dont need a guide but the lodges are so well developed, with decent food on menus, hot showers etc, its at least 25$ and day per person. Guides want 15 $ a day before food or porters etc. so we’ve actually spent quite a lot in Nepal so far, even though you can get a hotel room and something to eat elsewhere for next to nothing.
Anyway slightly off topic! I didn’t want to go somewhere really touristy or expensive so out of loads of options we picked Manaslu. Due to the lack of lodges it is usually undertaken as a full camping trek but this can get ridiculous: guide, porter to carry tent and food, cook, cook needs assistant, porter to carry kitchen stuff, porter to carry food for porters, porter to carry tent for porters…. 2 people end up with a nine man entourage, all of who obviously need paying! This didn’t seem appealing – we can carry our own things, we have our own stove and can cook, we can carry our own tent….
When we met the guide to discuss he said there were villages on route where we could find places to stay and that it was only vital to have a tent for one night, so we would eat in villages, stay in basic lodges/home-stays and wouldn’t need the entourage. All was set except we didn’t have our tent, and when we came to hire one it was 70$, so we agreed to go without one at all.
We headed to Gorkha, a big town where we could enjoy the Tihar festival away from Thamel – ktm tourist central. Stayed somewhere pretty sublime, suggested by the guide and looked around, quickly realising we didn’t like being told what to do, having been completely in charge of ourselves until now.
That night Tihar, the festival of lights. Some ridiculously complicated Hindu God brother in law returned from exile, the upshot being that candles and fairy lights are hung from everything making all look pretty, and many animals are slaughtered for the family feasting. Unfortunately we’d been having regular powercuts, about 2 hours a night which isnt much for Nepal and tonight was no exception. So the town looked nice lit by candles but the lights were out of action. Also kids come round with a 2 ended drum and dance and sing Nepali style and people give offerings. Its really well done and good fun and several different groups came along in the evening, but they always want you to dance. Next morning climbed up to the temple and looked out over miles and miles of Himalaya. The stairs leading down were stained red with blood from animal sacrifice. Later a 4×4 track to Arughat to the start of the trail. Some was ok but some 2/3 ft deep mud in places, steep hairpins, bone crunching holes and quite exposed to drops down the hillsides. Naturally, all was attempted in a fully loaded TATA bus. It was funny watching another one come along the opposite way, rolling along side to side, fighting through the mud with passengers loaded inside and on top – is that what we look like?! But it was nothing compared to the bus ride in Langtang. A three hour walk brought us to Arughat Bazaar.
Being the start of the trail there was 3 or 4 hotels and loads of shops selling the same thing. Picked up snacks and got ripped off at the hotel (They turned not having a menu to their advantage) and set off the next day into the wilderness, a bit pissed off.
Playing on a bamboo swing built for Tihar:
Kids dancing and singing for Tihar
Company
It was pelting hot for the first 2/3 days and we sweated profusely until we had gained some altitude. We encountered Maoists who wanted 2000 rps each and were haggled down to 1000. First night arrive Khursani which was a one Buffalo town. Basic wooden constructions with almost no modern stuff except pots and pans. Our beds were in a dorm style room with wooden bars looking out on the horses below. I think the family normally slept in there. We were a bit surprised that it was open to the night air in such a big way. Washing facilities was a 5 min walk to a hose sticking out of the ground in between the other 2 houses in town! We were sitting around drinking rakshi with family that night, and in amongst the bustle of the dutch’s porters mincing around drinking, ate dhal bhaat and had a good time. Two more groups of kids came by going village to village, in a throng of singing and dancing, decked us with garlands and generally made tits of us. The dutch are Hester and Michial, doctors about our age. Their proters are cool, Karna, Siam, Kapi, “funny man”Kailash and guide Shikar. Our guide turns out to be incredibly sociable and has networked his way around everyone anywhere, drinking a lot of rakshi in the process. He’s 30, called Krishna. He speaks to everyone we pass or meet during the 18 days.
Bheri Gandaki River
We followed this unbelievable valley for 6 days hard climbing up and down and crossing the river below many times on all manner of bridges. Some of the trail was really hairy, narrowly clinging to the edge of a cliff, arriving in Namrung where we slept on plain wood beds with the strong smell of kerosine fumes from the kitchen underneath! We had been enjoying our stove and made some curried potatoes with the spices and veg we bought in Arughat. The Nepali tea we had been brewing up was starting to taste acceptable after plenty of practice. While Kathryn had been ill and was struggling to eat the local food, we often passed by the camping groups at meal times. We were becoming seriously jealous of the full camping groups who got 3 courses and comfortable tents, we had slept in some seriously dodgy rooms, even i was sick of eating noodles for breakfast because there was nothing else. Nepalis eat Dhal Bhaat twice a day at 11 and 7, and nothing else really. Not good if you are Kathryn and off the db with a dodgy belly. But it was such an incredible place. We tried to take photos but it was impossible to capture the scale of the cliffs, waterfalls and valley walls. The walls of this valley must rise 500m steeply up from the river, and then far more, and huge tumbling waterfalls were common, pouring off into the air, for 6 days.
Tibet?
After 6 days we came out of the gorge and headed up through forests of pine rhododendron and bamboo as the valley opened out. The next 4 days we walked to Lho, Sama Goan, Manaslu base camp and Samdo, quickly gaining altitude to reach 3860m. Everything is tibetan now, buildings, monasteries, dress, customs, language. The ridge line of snowy mountains to our right sets the border. There are numerous passes that must be crossed to get there, and are still used now as trade routes. Colourful prayer flags flap from everything, bhuddist monuments punctuate the trail. The buildings are stacked and terraced and the locals are busily harvesting the maize, and wheat, collecting fodder for the animals, drying it out for the winter. These villages had such a nice feel to them. They can’t have changed much for a long long time, everything is so labour intensive. Rocks are carried by guys with 2 planks made into a tough shelf, strapped to their back. Quarrying involves standing on top of a boulder, driving wedge shaped lumps of steel into fault lines with a sledge hammer, until the boulder splits. Repeat until stones are small enough to build with. To make them square when building a wall they are again pounded with hammers. But this is just one part of it all.
The tibetans know how to run a lodge so we were much more comfortable, 2 even had menus. Scored some maize tsampa and yak curry with yak butter tea in Samdo which was a result. Also the height meant that it was getting really cold at night, well below zero, something noticed by the campers….
Larkye La. 5160m
Up until Samdo we spent considerable time talking about what we would do before the pass: a massive day where you cross the highest point on the trek called Larkye La at 5200m. The last place to stop before it has no lodge or even a house, and our stove is not reliable at high altitudes so we needed to arrange a bed and food for the night. We knew the Dutch and English groups fairly well now, they both offered help. The Dutch were going over the same day as us and we ended up crashing their guides tent. They had a great cook who made us dinner and then breakfast at 4.30am. The stars were amazing when we got up, but it was bitterly cold, all the water in the tent froze, and the vapour from our breath covered the inside of the canvas in icicles. We set off before dawn and quickly hit the snows. The light up there in the mountains was unreal as the sun came up. It was a long time to the pass, wind, cold, sun, snow and ice reaching the Larkye La around midday. The worst was definitely to come, descending for 2/3 hours on ice, the miserable porters slipping and falling over in their cheap trainers. For my part I coaxed kathryn step by step, she doesn’t like going down. Finally we collapsed on the floor when we got off the ice and stared out at our new surroundings: The other side of the pass brought spectaluar glacial scenery, 3 huge channels of boulders and ice coming off the backs of several high ranges that were very close, combining further down into one thumper that had thrown up an enormous moraine: unreal. We washed in a beautiful, gentle river, although the water was about as cold as it gets. We followed the moraine down down down until Bimthang, where we got on some well earned Rakshi. 12hr day. Bimthang was so isolated. We were surprised to see that the tiny tibetan lodge and the girl who ran it, so cheerful and welcoming, had a menu. A round of questioning narrowed it down to rice and potatoes.
It was another long hard day to the next settlement, this was really wild country. 2 hours saw us cross the loose rocky sandy icy dangerous terrain of the glacier next morning, then down down through boulder strewn pine forests and on down. No-one lives up here. It’s day 15. We are tired from the pass and look for signs of human life as we descend through the forests alongside a bright green roaring river. Tilche, our destination after 7/8hrs walking is a proper village though, with a hotel, and after much negotiation we paid full price and through the nose for 2 beers!
Today we will join the Annapurna circuit and are excited about the comfortable lodges, choice of food and unprohibitive price of beer. It is not wild here: the path is maintained, schools, animals, hydro stations power the fridges – the beers are cold. Although we stuff our faces with good food, in relative comfort for the next 2 nights to Besi Sahar, the end of our trek, I’m glad we avoided this trek and so many tourists. We’d mostly hung out with Nepali people on this trip, and we’ve learnt loads including some language, and visited some pretty remote places.
We spent the next few days chilling by the lake in Pokhara, eating curry. We are back in Kathmandu now and leave to raft the Karnali river today. 24hr bus ride into the west of Nepal, 7 days on the river and then not sure where we’ll come back to. I’ve wanted to do this for 5 years now, and we’ve had our names down for this trip since arriving in Nepal. Not many trips go there because its remote and has some really big rapids. Surely that’s why you would want to go there?
